Field Notes05Method
One case is an observation, not a pattern
A reading drawn from a single case can be worth publishing. It is not worth calling a pattern, and the difference is not cosmetic.
August 2026
Two cases sharing a shape is weak evidence. One case has none at all — it is a hypothesis with a name. We publish those, because a well-framed question is useful, but they are labelled as observations so nobody mistakes a single instance for something that generalises.
What this rests on
Facts below are read out of the archive at the moment this page is built. Our reading of them is labelled separately.
From the archive
1
1 of 4 published ideas rests on a single case and is labelled an observation rather than a pattern.
The observation we hold is a good one — a founder shutting down a working product ahead of the shift that would have ended it. It still only happened once in this archive.